Format: Cartridge
Genre: 2d Fighter
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom

By the time 1993 rolled around, Capcom had shifted its development-- including its latest Street Fighter II iteration-- to its new CPS-2 arcade chipset, with its faster 68000 and more VRAM. It was difficult for the existing 16-bit home computers and consoles to do justice to the freshly released "Super" rendition of Street Fighter II, but this Genesis port manages to cram all of the characters, most of their animation, the new portrait art, and the refreshed stage designs into one giant 40 Megabit cartridge! The fonts and character sizes are obviously not as impressive as the arcade original's, but running on hardware from 1988, this port is an outstanding programming job.

Where Capcom's CPS-1 utilized a Yamaha YM sound chip, rendering the "Special Champion Edition" Genesis music very faithful to the arcade, CPS-2 shifted to a DSP, leaving the Mega Drive port's developers to go from scratch. They chose Capcom's internal custom sound driver, and while the digitized speech is somewhat low quality and the percussion is a bit lackluster, the melodies themselves are in many cases are more moody and atmosphere-lending than those from the arcade original! The high-pitched rendition of Fei Long's stage is straight out of a "Bruce Lee" film, while Vega's song is excellent as well.

As the popularity of sports games on the system will attest, the combination of the Genesis' Motorola 68000 and custom tile-based graphics chip made for some seriously fluid gameplay, and few genres benefit from the hardware as much as do fighting games. Like "Special Champion Edition" before it, this "Super" edition of Street Fighter II is butter smooth, while the Genesis' outstanding 6-button controller makes for the perfect companion. Uncharacteristically for the time, there are also a lot of extra modes like full knock-out, bracket-based tournament play.

The Genesis hardware can't even come close to touching Capcom's CPS-2, and consequently this port has radically scaled down character sizes, smaller fonts, poor digitized voice quality, and missing animation. At the same time though, it is positively jam-packed with content, with all sixteen characters present, and alternate play modes to enjoy. It's really fun seeing a Genesis Street Fighter II with all of the modern character colors and player portraits! Most importantly, it plays like an absolute dream. Until the 32-bit ports of "Super Turbo" came out, this Genesis iteration of "Super" was one of the best ways to experience the series, and it's still enjoyable to play even today.